I was sitting here waiting on the bus, about freezing to death, the
first time I saw him,” Kelly Howard says of Brother Al Mascia and the
Canticle Café mobile unit. She recalls the line forming at the Rosa
Parks Transit Center in downtown Detroit and people walking away with
coffee and sandwiches. “I said, ‘Free? Are you serious?’ So I got me a
sandwich and it was wonderful. I was going to the doctor, didn’t eat,
you know. I’m a diabetic, so it really helped me out.”

Five days a week, teams of volunteers minister in the style of St.
Francis, who left the walls of Assisi to help others. The first official
run of the bicycle-cart ministry, which includes a back-end trailer
loaded with seasonal necessities such as hats, gloves, scarves, socks,
and hand- and foot-warmers, was Christmas Day 2010.

The mobile-units ministry follows an 18-year tradition of St.
Aloysius Parish (served by the Franciscans of our own St. John the
Baptist Province) opening the doors of their community center’s Canticle
Café six mornings a week. Visitors to the Café would find coffee, along
with donated breakfast food.

The Café, part of the parish’s community center, was a respite for
men, women and children who had no home or needed a meal; a place to
warm up in the winter or cool off in the summer. Seniors in nearby
subsidized apartment buildings also gathered for fellowship and weekly
grocery bags. Then, this past October, the building holding the
community center and parish offices was shuttered.

“Once we learned that we would no longer be able to remain for a
number of reasons, including safety reasons, we started exploring the
possibility of renting space of our own. That led to dead ends,” says
Brother Al, coordinator of street ministry.

The parish offices were moved across the street and are tucked into
a small area of the ground floor of the rectory, attached to St.
Aloysius Church. “We Franciscans still felt a tremendous need to remain
and serve and minister in downtown Detroit, and we’re committed to
continue to do so,” says Brother Al, even without a brick-and-mortar
structure.

Brother Al, once a New Yorker, remembered the vendor carts plying
their goods in New York and the well-known Passover song “Dayenu,” sung
at every Seder meal. The song, listing the mighty acts of God, says that
each act “would have been enough.” Brother Al thought about a cart: Even if that’s all we have, that would be enough. The Canticle Café would be reborn—on wheels!

Volunteers and donations have paid for three bike units, and a
youth-group car wash is providing money for a fourth. Every Tuesday
through Saturday morning, carafes of coffee, hot chocolate, water and
whatever sandwiches, muffins or doughnuts have been donated are loaded
up and go out through the downtown streets. Two bike-cafés head over to
the transit center, which Brother Al says is akin to “a village square,”
and the third moves to Hart Plaza, a riverside park, where those
without homes often set up camp in an underground structure.

The fourth cart will be used to replenish the others. It will be
overseen by the parish nurse or a trained volunteer for anyone needing
medical help. The mobile units are used later in the day for a
concierge-style grocery bag delivery to seniors’ apartments.

“Anyone can come up and partake from our bicycle carts and be
shoulder-to-shoulder with folks from various walks of life,” says
Brother Al. “Something happens on the streets now that really hadn’t
happened in the brick-and-mortar café [at the parish]. It gives the
poorest of the poor an opportunity to donate back. I frequently get a
handful of change from even the most destitute of people.

“Then there was a well-to-do couple walking their greyhound through
the transit center who, once they heard what we were about, gave me $50
for a cup of coffee!” The public, accessible nature of the café, says
Brother Al, “gives us an opportunity to have a much more intimate
relationship with people.”

Linda Del Signore, a middle-aged woman with mental illness, was one
of those people. She spent her nights huddled in sleeping bags against a
building near the church. Brother Al could see her spot from his
bedroom on the eighth floor of the friary. On the morning of January 24,
2010, when she wasn’t there, he took off with the bicycle cart.
Blocks away, he found her lying in a doorway, wearing only a thin
blouse. Her sleeping bag and other possessions had been tossed nearby.
Brother Al covered her with stadium blankets donated only the day
before, called 911 and then called the parish nurse.

After an hour of trying to revive her, one of the paramedics came
up to him and said, “I’m sorry.” Brother Al has since learned about the
phenomenon of disoriented clothing removal that can happen in cases of
hypothermia. The temperature that night had dipped to just below
freezing.

The revival of downtown Detroit must accommodate people such as
Linda, Brother Al insists. With God’s grace, he says, “we hope to grow
our bicycle ministry to be a presence and a witness.” This time offers a
“privileged opportunity,” he says, to use a new type of urban renewal,
one based more on loving, caring, “more based on relationships.”

As the winter winds blow across Detroit again this year, Brother Al
and friends will build those relationships, serving food and drink from
their carts, bringing warmth, inside and out, to everyone along the
way.